


float in space and drift in time

by luxluminaire



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Character Study, Dreams, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-15
Packaged: 2019-03-30 04:45:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13942878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luxluminaire/pseuds/luxluminaire
Summary: Some people say that your dreams show you the person that you are destined to be with in reality. When Renée Minkowski starts dreaming about a girl named Isabel, she feels the immediate connection between them, but is she truly her supposed soulmate? As the years pass by, she searches relentlessly for the answer - until one day, long after she has given up on encountering her in the real world, their paths finally cross in the most unlikely of circumstances.





	1. Chapter 1

The dreams begin when Renée is thirteen.

The first one manifests itself uneventfully at first, a slow drift through the vast expanse of space as she floats a short distance away from a large spacecraft--one of the stations out in deep space, maybe, which she hears about in the news every now and then as a reminder of how far humanity is pushing into the galaxy. She looks down and notices that she is wearing a real space suit, like the ones she has seen in books and museums. Not far away from her, another astronaut floats untethered. Her companion does not speak, not yet, and so she tests the waters with tentative words.

“Hello?” she calls out. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

The other person tilts their head in an unmistakable display of confusion. Renée then realizes that this person likely cannot understand her, as she has defaulted to speaking Polish as she often does in her dreams. She tries again in English, hating the heaviness of the accent in her voice that immediately marks her as something _different_.

“Well, I mean, I guess I’m floating in space.” The voice in response belongs to another girl, and its sound is filtered through the comms system in Renée’s helmet. “Except I don’t really know how I got here. But, um, my name’s Isabel. What’s yours?”

“I’m Renée,” she replies.

She tries to imagine what Isabel looks like beneath her helmet, but her mind comes up short, unable to supply a face to accompany the voice. Instead, she tests the range of her motion in zero-gravity and discovers that she lacks the momentum to travel far. If she had a source of propulsion or something to push off from, perhaps she could float toward the space station, but for now she drifts wherever the forces of the universe take her.

“What language was that, when you were talking before?” Isabel asks. “Where are you from?”

Renée frowns at the immediate recognition of how foreign she sounds. “It was Polish,” she says. “I was born in Poland, but I came to America two years ago. Now I live in California.” But not the fun part of California, she wants to add. Not the big cities and beaches and theme parks, but rather a boring small town where she feels like she doesn’t belong.

Isabel makes a quiet noise of understanding. “I live in Brooklyn. In, uh, in New York City,” she adds, as if she is suddenly unsure of whether Renée knows where that is without the clarification. She does, of course. She may be a relative newcomer to the United States, but she’s not _stupid_. “You speak English really well.”

“People at school make fun of my accent,” Renée admits, confessing the insecurity that plagues her whenever she feels English words on her tongue. She remembers the mocking imitations of how she speaks, the snickering laughter when she mispronounces a word, and the constant butcherings of her last name no matter how many times she insists that it’s “Min- _kov-_ ski” and not “Min- _cow-_ ski.” She has thought about teaching herself how to speak like an American, losing the thick vowels and heavy consonants that set her apart from her classmates, but it will be a long process.

“Sorry. That must suck,” Isabel replies.

A rush of gratitude passes through Renée at her response. Isabel is not the only one who has acknowledged how unfair it is for her to be picked on for something that shouldn’t define her, but the immediate sympathy heartens her regardless. “Yeah, it does,” she says. She does not want Isabel to pity her too much, though, and so she adds, “A few days ago I almost punched a boy in my class who was teasing me during lunch. But a teacher was watching, so I didn’t do it.”

The friendly sound of Isabel’s laughter fills her ears. “You should have punched him anyway.”

Renée laughs too. It’s good to be able to laugh with someone like this, someone who already feels like a friend even though she has only known her for this fraction of a dreaming moment. A warm sensation rises in Renée’s chest, and she immediately knows that she wants to find out more about this girl who floats beside her in space.

She opens her mouth to speak, even though she is unsure of what she wants to say. The words do not come, however, and soon everything fades away into her waking perceptions. The vast expanse of space is replaced by her dark bedroom, and the only stars that she sees are the glow-in-the-dark ones stuck to her ceiling, their luminosity dimming as the night wears on.

 _Isabel_ , she thinks, clinging to the fading memory of the girl in her dream. _Isabel_.

 

* * *

 

Renée does not have the dream again until a few weeks later. This time the deep-space scene feels more familiar, not quite like coming home but rather like visiting someone’s house for a second time when she already knows what to expect. The figure of an astronaut floats near her once again, and she now recognizes its size and shape.

“Isabel?” she asks, her voice hesitant.

“Yeah,” replies the now-familiar voice over her helmet comms. “Renée?”

Renée nods, the movement large and exaggerated beneath her helmet. A burst of joy blossoms inside her at how her dreams have led the two of them to each other again. She has thought about Isabel every now and then since the initial dream, wondering how a stranger in her sleeping mind can be so vivid even when she is nothing but a voice and a space suit. No other strangers in her dreams have ever felt so real, as if they are more than echoes and shadows of reality.

A few minor details in the scene have changed since the last dream, setting it apart from what she remembers. She checks her space suit and discovers that she has some kind of propulsion unit attached to her back that she can use to propel her closer to the nearby space station. Isabel has one too, as if the environment has responded to their mutual desire to explore their surroundings. When Renée activates the propulsion unit, she shoots forward with more force than she expects, which earns her a giggle from Isabel.

“It’s harder than it looks,” Renée replies with a scowl.

Isabel tries out the new method of movement as well, discovering for herself how difficult unpracticed movements in space can be. The two of them make their way toward the space station in short bursts of uncontrolled propulsion, and they are both lost in laughter by the time they reach the station’s hard surface of metal and steel. Renée has read enough books and seen enough documentaries about space stations to know what to do next, and so she approaches the prospect of climbing onto the station with no hesitation or trepidation.

“Whoa,” Isabel says with a quiet gasp of breath as Renée’s boots cement themselves to the hull of the station, placing her on solid ground. “Why aren’t you floating away?”

“Magnetic gear,” Renée explains. “Like what the real astronauts use. We can walk on the outside of the station like there’s gravity.”

Isabel copies her movements to join her on the hull. She moves her feet experimentally to test the surface beneath her. “You’re kind of a nerd about this stuff, huh?” she says. She does not say “nerd” in the disparaging way that Renée’s classmates do, but rather as if she is genuinely impressed by her knowledge.

“I want to be an astronaut when I’m older,” replies Renée. “And go to space for real. Not just in dreams.”

They walk together with clunking, halting steps against the hull of the station, their conversation carrying them through the aimless journey. Renée tells her about how she has spent her entire life looking up at the stars and wishing to be among them one day, witnessing all of the beautiful sights that the universe has to offer, and in turn she learns a little more about Isabel. She is younger than Renée is, eleven years old and in the sixth grade, and yet somehow she seems cooler than any of the sixth-graders at Renée’s school are. She does not have a definite picture of her future (“It would be cool to play basketball for the WNBA, I guess,” she says, “or maybe be in the military for a little while like my mom”), but not everyone can be concrete in their goals, Renée supposes. With each story that they exchange, she gains a clearer picture of who Isabel is, and the girl in the space suit becomes less of a mystery and more of a friend.

The dream fades away eventually, less abruptly than last time but still leaving Renée reaching desperately back into her sleeping mind to hold onto the dream for as long as possible. It can’t be a coincidence that she has dreamed of Isabel twice, she decides as she lies awake in her bed. The dream must be trying to tell her something, or perhaps Isabel represents a deeper desire within her. She does not make friends easily, after all, and so maybe Isabel is her subconsciousness giving her someone whom she can immediately connect with. There _has_ to be something special about her, if someone as cool and interesting as she is can look upon Renée and not judge her the way that others do. As the dreams surface again and again, she is determined to find out why.

“Are you real?” she asks Isabel several months later when she has had the dream at least seven or eight times by now. They stand on what has become their favorite spot on the exterior of the space station, a vantage point where they feel like they’re standing on the top of the world--or, in this case, the top of the galaxy. They have shared many conversations atop this perch, discussing what is happening in their waking lives and what they think is waiting for them out in the universe, and now it serves as the location where Renée asks the question that has plagued her for months. “I’m not just making you up, right?”

“Of course I’m real,” Isabel replies. “I think we’re a little too old for imaginary friends.”

“I thought that maybe--” Renée breaks off, her thoughts sounding foolish as she verges upon giving voice to them. “I mean, this _is_ a dream. None of it can be completely real.”

At first Isabel does not respond, a strange departure from their usual conversations where she often pushes past hesitation like a force of nature. She steps closer to Renée, the magnetic grip of her boots heavy against the hull, and reaches to take hold of her hand. Renée’s breath catches in her throat at the touch. They have never made physical contact with each other in any of the prior dreams, and although the bulky material of their gloves impedes the brush of skin against skin, the touch courses through Renée’s body like a shockwave. She has never felt so anything electric in her blood, as if Isabel’s hand is _meant_ to rest here in hers, a puzzle piece that fits perfectly around her.

Isabel pulls her hand away before Renée has time to fully process the feeling. “Sorry,” she says. “Was that weird, or...”

“No, not at all,” Renée assures her. _It was nice_ , she wants to say, but the words do not come. “But if you did it to prove that you’re really here, I think it worked.”

“Good.”

Isabel laughs in relief, the sound bordering upon nervous excitement. Has she felt the same electric burst, the same sensation of unquestionable _belonging_? The inquiry does not form itself into a coherent thought that Renée can articulate, and so instead they stand together in silence looking out into space with the uncertainty of unspoken words floating between them.

The dream soon disappears like it always does, never when she wants it to. When she wakes up in her bed, she finds her arm outstretched, reaching toward something that is not there. The phantom sensation of Isabel’s hand lingers against hers as if her waking self has felt it too, and the strange pang of longing that accompanies it stays with her until long after she has drifted off to sleep again.

 

* * *

 

As much as Renée looks forward to every dream about Isabel that she has, the continued lack of explanation about the “how” and “why” leaves her with an insatiable curiosity during the weeks between the dreams. She is going to figure out what all of this means, she decides, and she sets her goal with a single-minded focus that drives her forward. Some people call it stubbornness, but she calls it determination, and she will not be satisfied until she discovers the meaning behind her mysterious series of dreams and the strong emotions that they elicit within her.

Her best opportunity for research comes on one of her days off from school when she accompanies her parents to the college that they teach at, as she often does when she isn’t at school but college classes are still in session. With the freedom to roam certain sections of the campus, she immediately heads to the library, where she spends the entire morning tucked away in a quiet corner with a pile of books. She searches for any mention of recurring dreams, particularly ones that take place in outer space or involve the presence of a person who the dreamer has never met in their waking life. Most of the books are frustratingly unhelpful, filled with psychological and scientific concepts that she does not understand. The closest lead she finds is a paragraph titled “Dreams and Soulmates,” which describes patterns of recurring dreams that lead the sleeping mind to the person whom they are destined to fall in love with, regardless of whether their waking self has encountered this person in reality. Renée is familiar with the word “soulmate,” of course, but despite the similarities between her own dreams and the scenario that the book presents, something doesn't quite line up. If she truly is dreaming about her soulmate, she’d expect him to be a boy, someone who would become a boyfriend and then eventually a husband if their paths ever cross in reality. It doesn’t make sense for her soulmate to be a girl floating in space, someone who Renée has never actually _seen_ beyond the concealing exterior of the space suits that they both wear. Something different must be at play here.

She closes the book in frustration and painstakingly returns each book to its original shelf. Feeling no closer to an answer than she did when she started, she leaves the library and finds her way back to her father’s office in one of the academic buildings. She arrives just in time to accompany him to one of his classes, where she often enjoys sitting in the back of the lecture hall and taking in everything that he teaches about unraveling the secrets of the universe, even though most of the theorems and concepts are far beyond her current level of understanding. Today, however, she is distracted, and her focus slips away from the book she is reading to linger upon the now-familiar dreamscape of the space station and the whisper of the word _soulmate_.

No matter how many times she tries to push these thoughts away and declare the nature of her dreams an unsolved mystery, they continue to nag at her. She lies awake at night, her mind filled with questions, and when she eventually does drift into slumber she does not yet revisit the scene of Isabel and the space station. It’s as if her subconscious _knows_ that she wants to face her next dream armed with a complete sense of what it means, and so her mind refuses to let her rest until she either finds a new answer or accepts the explanation of “something to do with soulmates” no matter how absurd it is.

She asks her mother about it one evening while working on her math homework at the kitchen table, hedging her question in hypotheticals that she suspects her mother sees right through. “Those kinds of things are usually just stories,” her mother replies. “Almost like fairytales. It’s romantic to think about having one person out there who you’re destined to fall in love with, but reality doesn’t always work out that way. When you’re older, you’ll realize that you don’t need dreams to show you who you love.”

“But what if your dreams show you someone who you don’t think can be your soulmate, but everything else fits?” Renée asks, again speaking in vague terms and not the plain sentiment of _my soulmate is apparently a girl who lives on the other side of the country and that doesn’t make sense_.

“I don’t know, ma cherie,” her mother says. “You shouldn’t be concerned about these things right now.”

Renée returns her attention to her homework in defeat, focusing instead on the problems that she _can_ solve. When she goes to bed that night, her mind continues to run in frustrated circles until she drifts off to sleep. She finally returns to the space station and Isabel’s presence, and her heart leaps in her chest at the familiar sight of her spacefaring companion. Even after the weeks that she has spent delving into the meanings of the dreams, she has not prepared herself for what to do when she _does_ see Isabel again. Any words that she wants to say become caught in her throat, and so after Isabel’s greeting of “Hey, it’s been a while,” she can only stammer “Y-yeah, it has” in return.

They float together, not yet setting a path toward the space station. “Do you want to try opening one of the airlocks again?” Isabel asks, taking the initiative in continuing their conversation. In their explorations of the station’s exterior, they have discovered multiple airlocks leading inside, but all of their efforts to enter the station have been unsuccessful even with the loose logic of dreams. Even when they had managed to crack open one of the hatches on a prior occasion, the dream had immediately dissolved as if they had done something to disrupt the rules and boundaries of the landscape.

“No, I think we’ve tried everything by now,” Renée replies.

“Hmm.” Isabel floats around Renée in a circular path as if she is studying her closely. “I could tell you a really bad joke about a guy with a pineapple for a head.”

The concept of the joke alone draws out a quiet breath of laughter from Renée. “What makes you think I need to hear a joke?”

“Because you’re being all quiet and _boring_.” Isabel says “boring” as if it’s the worst thing a person can possibly be. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” replies Renée. It’s a lie, of course, because the word “fine” does not encompass “you might be my soulmate and I don’t know what to do about that.” She could ask Isabel about it directly, but the thought makes her stomach churn with nervousness and a fear of embarrassment.

“Come on,” Isabel encourages her. She nudges her gently, the heavy material of their space suits brushing against each other. “Just say whatever’s on your mind already.”

Renée exhales a breath, its sound likely carrying across the comms. She looks at the vague shape of the face that she can see beneath Isabel’s helmet. “Do you ever wish that we could see each other’s faces without our helmets on when we meet like this?” she asks. “It’s weird, isn’t it, that I have no idea what you look like.”

“Well…” A hint of mischievousness enters Isabel’s voice. “What’s stopping us from taking our helmets off?”

“Because we wouldn’t be able to breathe?” replies Renée. “Is that really a question?”

“Don’t tell me you’re _scared_ ,” Isabel teases. “Besides, it’s just a dream. The worst thing that can happen is that we’ll wake up.”

Renée scowls at her playful taunt, even though Isabel will not be able to see the irritated expression. “I’m not scared. I just… If something goes wrong, I don’t want to wake up after only seeing you for a few minutes. Not when I’m never sure when I’m going to see you again.”

“Because you’ll miss me?” Isabel asks.

Renée swallows hard to reintroduce moisture into her mouth. “Because… Because maybe we’re supposed to be together like this,” she says. “And maybe one day we’ll meet in the real world and…” She trails off, unsure of how she wants to finish that thought.

“Yeah, but how are you going to find me in the real world if you don’t know what I look like?” Isabel points out. “Come on, Renée. Be a little adventurous.”

If nothing else, at least Isabel knows exactly how to goad her into taking a risk. “Fine,” she relents. “We’ll take our helmets off at the same time. And if it makes us wake up, I blame you.”

Isabel laughs. “That’s the spirit.”

Renée fumbles with the mechanisms on her helmet, her fingers clumsy under her thick gloves. Despite all of the books she has read about astronauts, she does not know the proper method for removing important components of her space suit, but her dreaming mind fills in the blanks to make it possible. Isabel mirrors her actions, and in a moment of mutual hesitation, their hands stop their movement before taking the final step to look upon each other’s faces for the first time.

Renée instinctively holds her breath as she pulls off the shielding visor of her helmet, fearing that even within the dream she will lose the ability to breathe without the access to the oxygen supply from her space suit. She does not let the single breath leave her lungs as Isabel’s helmet comes free, revealing dark skin and curly hair. Renée takes in every inch of her face, the line of her jaw and the sparkle in her brown eyes, before the scene around her vanishes as her consciousness pulls her out of the dream.

“No, not now,” she cries out in defiance, but her mind does not listen. She wakes with the last syllable of her words upon her lips as her heart pounds in her chest with the adrenaline of being jolted out of sleep. She does not yet forget Isabel’s face, however, and the memory of her mischievous eyes and the crooked line of her smile stays with her when she drifts back to sleep and remains for a long time after.

 

* * *

 

As the years pass, the dreams occur less often, slowing down to once every few months as Renée continues through her teenage years and enters high school. She does not notice the decrease in frequency at first, too caught up in everything happening in her waking life--her studies, her extracurricular activities, and her personal endeavors. The dreams are no longer the novelty that they used to be, but rather an occasional drift into comforting familiarity like seeing a friend after months apart. Whenever her dreams take her to Isabel, Renée feels like no time has passed since she last saw her, regardless of how long the interval has been.

High school is when she finally decides to train herself to speak English without a Polish accent, learning how to feel the words on her tongue so that people will no longer immediately pass judgment on her whenever she opens her mouth. Even in her dreams she is conscious of how she speaks, and she wonders if Isabel notices her improvement in between their encounters. Then again, Isabel has never judged her for anything during their time together. Light teasing, certainly, about things that don’t matter, but never anything mean-spirited about who she is and where she comes from. It’s one of the many things that Renée likes about her, even though she often wonders whether she and Isabel would get along in the real world if they hadn’t been thrown together in these mysterious dreaming circumstances.

“I’m glad that we’re friends,” she confesses during one dream, her words no longer weighed down with the alienness of a foreign accent. She now sounds no different than someone who has spent her entire life in America, and that, she thinks, is a triumph.

“Jeez, what’s got you so sappy?” Isabel replies. She floats upside-down in front of Renée, taking full advantage of the lack of gravity as she often does when they are together. The limits of the dream have prevented Renée from seeing her face beyond the brief glimpse she had received when they had removed their helmets, but she can easily imagine the smile on her lips: the slight upturn of her mouth that is both playful and genuine.

“It just felt like something I should say,” Renée says. “Even if we never meet in the real world, at least we can hope that we’ll always see each other like this.”

Isabel flips herself around to face Renée in a more upright position, bracing a hand against her shoulder to steady herself. Casual touches between the two of them are not unusual anymore, but each one never fails to send a burst of electricity through Renée. “What makes you think that we might stop dreaming about each other?”

“Well, the dreams don’t happen as much as they used to,” says Renée. “Maybe it’s not something that lasts forever.”

“You worry too much.” Isabel does not yet remove her hand from Renée’s shoulder. She punches it lightly in a teasing motion. “I’m sure I’ll always be here with you, no matter what happens.”

“Now who’s the sappy one?” Renée retorts, and Isabel laughs in a warm, familiar sound that manages to crack a smile beneath the cover of Renée’s helmet.

As time passes, however, Renée wonders if the busy activity and increased stressors of her waking hours directly impact how often she sees Isabel. She focuses firmly upon her future during the remainder of her high school years, studying hard to maintain good grades as she works toward the goal of attending the Air Force Academy after graduation, the first step toward her still-held dream of becoming an astronaut. She has little time for socialization outside of school, and so it would only make sense that socializing in her dreams is affected as well, supposed soulmates or not. It’s not like Isabel isn’t keeping busy as well, judging by the stories that she hears when they _do_ see each other about how Isabel has risen to be the star player of her school’s basketball team. The slightest twinge of jealousy passes through Renée at how Isabel seems to enjoy athletic, academic, and social success all at once. It reinforces her fear that in different circumstances Isabel wouldn’t bother with her at all.

Renée’s senior year of high school, when it arrives, is mostly a waiting game once she has all of the paperwork for the Air Force Academy in order and puts her application in the mail. The rational part of her knows that it’s a long shot, and chances are they will want someone who is better, smarter, more American--but even as she makes back-up plans just in case, she does not allow her hope to wane. When she finally receives the acceptance letter that she has longed for, she feels like she is walking on air, or perhaps floating among the stars like she has done so many times in her dreams. Being recognized, being _chosen_ , for her potential floods through her as one of the best feelings she has ever experienced, even though the military path that lies ahead of her will not be easy.

“You’ll do great,” Isabel says to her when Renée shares the good news with her when they meet in their dreams a few weeks before Renée leaves for basic training. She hugs her as tightly as she can with the bulkiness of their space suits. “I’m sure you’re going to kick all kinds of ass out there with the Air Force.”

“Thanks,” Renée replies. Her heart beats fast in her chest at their embrace, and she believes in Isabel’s encouraging words more than anything even when the dreamscape fades away.

She doesn’t have much time or energy to dream throughout the summer that she spends at basic training, too exhausted from the grueling process of having her former self melted down and re-molded into a soldier that the Air Force can be proud of. She endures the physical and psychological challenges that she faces, steeling herself against weakness and emerging as someone who is no longer a misfit young girl, but rather a woman in uniform who follows orders like a reflex. The period of strict military training gives her little time to let her thoughts wander to Isabel as they often do between dreams, and even when her first year at the Academy properly begins most of her focus is delegated to her coursework and abiding by the regulations placed upon her. Perhaps her dreams about Isabel were a childish thing after all, a response to her yearning for friendship when she felt like she had no one in her waking life. Part of her must not be ready to let go yet, however, because the dreams have not vanished completely even with the intensity of her life as an Air Force cadet.

In a coincidental twist of fate she learns that Isabel has ended up at the Air Force Academy as well, through a casual comment during one of the now-rare occasions when their dreams intersect. They have not had extensive prior conversations about the shared military path that they have both chosen to pursue, but Renée can’t help but wonder if Isabel has followed her into the Air Force hoping to encounter her in the real world. She keeps an eye out for her in her day-to-day life, scanning the sea of cadets for a glimpse of a familiar face or the sound of the name Lovelace. Isabel remains elusive, however, refusing to manifest in the reality beyond the dream-fueled memory of a space-suited figure and the single flash of her face. It is therefore easy for Renée to dismiss the idea of their paths being destined to cross in reality. If they were meant to meet one day, guided by fate and the visions of their dreams, surely it would have happened here at the Academy, where they could be mere yards away from each other and yet never know. None of her inquiries about whether anyone has encountered a cadet named Lovelace turn up any results, and so the eternal question of whether her dreams have truly been pointing her toward her soulmate is put aside and then abandoned completely.

After graduation, Renée finds true passion in her work with the Air Force. She falls in love with seeing the world from the pilot’s seat, along with the thrill of takeoffs and landings and the satisfaction of hitting a target. It’s not the view from space that she has always longed to see in reality, but there’s a beautiful bliss that comes from being in the air. Whenever she looks down at the landscape below her, all of her problems seem so small, and she is often far too tempted to lose herself in the feeling. She never does, however, always keeping herself firmly rooted in reality and the present moment no matter where her mind takes her.

As she casts away any lingering thoughts about Isabel, she also more fully embraces finding companionship with someone else, even though dating is not exactly her strong suit. She stumbles in and out of attraction, not only to men but also a few women as well (and if nothing else, at least that explains why her supposed soulmate was female, now that she can wrap her head around her sexuality with more clarity than she could as a teenager). The relationships that she develops are never lasting, always ending prematurely because perhaps Renée’s true love throughout her twenties is her work. There’s a transitory nature to the years that she spends on active duty, and her personal relationships certainly suffer for it as she moves from one posting to another.

Her sleeping thoughts seem to have no interest in moving on, however, and they continue to taunt her with old desires whenever she returns to Isabel and the space station. The dreams only happen once every one or two years and never last very long, but they occur often enough to remind her that she cannot escape whatever the dreams are trying to tell her. With the childish wonder at her surroundings having worn off long ago and the lack of engaging conversation between her and Isabel despite their shared career experiences, she doesn’t miss the dreams at all during the long intervals between them. As much as she feels like she has betrayed her younger self for thinking so, the dreams now feel more like a nuisance than anything else, a reminder that she cannot push away the relic of her childhood desire for companionship and acceptance no matter how hard she tries to do so.

“How have you been?” she offers to Isabel during one of their infrequent encounters. Over fifteen years have now passed since the first time they met in their dreams, and yet the expanse of deep space that surrounds them remains the same as ever despite the changes that have happened in the two women who float within it.

Isabel makes a noise of indifference. “This deployment has been a pain in the ass. Too much sitting around waiting for something to happen. How about you?”

“I’m good. Nothing to complain about.” Her work remains fulfilling, after all, although she has now turned her eyes toward the horizon of directly pursuing a position in one of NASA’s spaceflight programs. NASA may not travel out as far into space as some of the privately funded organizations do, but their programs are well-regarded and she meets all of their qualifications. Maybe by the time she has this dream again, she will have traveled to space in reality, replacing the imagined scenery with her memories of what she has witnessed.

She and Isabel float together in silence, their conversation having already fizzled out in the inevitable awkwardness of having nothing to say to the person who she used to be able to talk with for what seemed like hours. Renée frowns, the expression obscured by her helmet, and she wishes that she knew what to say. The joy of swapping stories has worn off, and there’s no use in exploring the exterior of a space station that she has mentally mapped every inch of years ago. Instead there is only this remnant of her teenage years, as if her mind is trying to convince her of something that she knows cannot be true.

“So we finally ran out of things to talk about, huh?” Isabel says eventually, voicing similar thoughts.

“Seems like it,” replies Renée. “I don’t know, it’s just not the same now as when we were younger.”

Isabel murmurs in agreement. “I thought that by now we might have…” She trails off, leaving the rest of the thought an unfinished mystery. “No use worrying about it now, I guess. Maybe next time this won’t be such a drag.”

“Yeah. Next time,” Renée echoes her, even though “next time” becomes increasingly longer with each time that the dream dissolves. “Whenever that is.”

A brief breath of laughter comes through the helmet comms. “Well, see you later, Renée.”

“Wait, where are you--” Renée begins, but the words have barely left her mouth when her surroundings vanish as abruptly as Isabel’s farewell, and when she wakes up, she is inescapably alone.

 

* * *

 

Eventually, the dreams stop completely.

Renée meets Dominik on one sunny afternoon in Paris, and it’s the type of immediate, whirlwind romance that she previously believed to only happen in stories. The fleeting thought of soulmates enters her mind, of course, along with the old question of whether she needs mysterious dreams to tell her who she is destined to fall in love with. By this point Isabel is nothing more than a distant figure to her, however, a comforting presence in her younger years that has since fallen away. She therefore does not hesitate to fall in love with Dominik, swept up in their instant connection, and even when distance separates them after their time in Paris comes to a close, she knows that something special exists between them that will keep them together.

They’re married within two years, and Renée is the happiest that she’s ever been even though her lifelong dream of going to space gets further and further away each time NASA rejects her applications. She cannot escape the occasional feeling that she is not where she is supposed to be, but she writes it off as her impatience from the repeated rejections. It’s an inevitable response, after all, to feel like something is not right when she faces the failure of not being good enough for something that she desires. If nothing else, at least she has the stubbornness and perseverance, two sides of the same coin, to push forward with the support of the people she loves.

She is driving home from work one day when a strong feeling overwhelms her without warning, like someone has reached into her chest and tugged out her heart. It’s almost as if part of her is _gone_ , leaving a gaping hole in its absence, and she has the sudden urge to cry out, to scream in unknown grief. Her vision blurs so badly that she has to pull over to the side of the road to collect herself, her car rolling to a stop as the other cars zip by her. Tears flood her eyes unbidden, and she clutches the steering wheel with trembling, white-knuckled hands as she sobs out this strange rush of emotions.

She pulls herself together with deep, steady breaths, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose. The emptiness in her chest does not go away, and it leaves her with a lingering sense that somewhere in the world something has gone terribly wrong. She checks her phone, wondering if she has missed a call or text that carries bad news, but no notifications appear. Instead there is only the mystery of why she has been so suddenly overcome with emotion, weeping as if a piece of her has died. She must be a pitiful sight right now, the strong military woman crying in her car for no discernible reason. But she does not intend to let her emotions compromise her for longer than she has to, and so with another deep breath and the construction of the mental walls of soldiering on, she starts up her car and makes a valiant effort to bury what has overcome her.

“Everything’s fine,” she says to Dominik a couple of hours later when he comments on how she hasn’t quite been herself since returning home. Once again she cannot escape the back-of-the-mind thought that she is not supposed to be here, sitting across from him at the dinner table like she has done on countless nights before this one. “I’m just feeling a little under the weather, that’s all. I should probably go to bed early tonight.”

She retreats to their bedroom after dinner and lies down, still feeling drained and unfocused. No matter how much she tries to distract herself with a book in her hand or music in her ears, the aftermath of her rush of emotions does not fade away. Even when Dominik comes into the room later in the evening, as she lies in bed feigning sleep, she does not feel the reassurance from his presence that she expects. Instead the cavernous void in her chest grows larger, and she finds herself thinking about Isabel for the first time in years. Why does her face enter Renée’s mind now, of all times, when she no longer has the desperate need for companionship that she felt in her adolescence? The answer to that question eludes her, leaving her with nothing but the continued ache in her heart as she curls in on herself with the blankets clutched tightly around her.

When she finally drifts off to sleep, she finds herself in the landscape of space that she thought her dreaming mind had abandoned. This time, however, there is no friendly voice to greet her and no thickly gloved hand to take in her own. She is alone, lost among the sea of stars with no one to accompany her.

“Isabel?” she calls out to her missing companion. “Isabel? Where are you?”

She cries out her name again and again, her voice cracking in her desperation, but she never receives a response. Only silence surrounds her, and the void of space closes in around her as she floats, tiny and alone, through the dreamscape that is now as empty as the piece that has been pulled out of her, like a star that has sent out its final rays of light before vanishing forever.


	2. Chapter 2

A few months later, Renée gets a call from Goddard Futuristics about a job opening in their deep space division.

Somehow Mr. Cutter, the man in the perfectly tailored suit who presides over the interview, knows _exactly_ what to say to her to convince her to take the job. He reads her like a book as he pulls out details of her life to wield against her: her lifelong wish to be among the stars, her longing to become someone who _matters_ beyond her current status as a stagnating Air Force lieutenant, her parents’ sacrifices of their promising careers for the sake of raising a family. Before Renée can fully process what is happening, she is filling out forms and signing contracts with a sigh of “My husband is going to to _kill_ me.” She does not regret her decision, however. When Cutter calls her “ _Commander_ Minkowski,” emphasizing the promoted rank that she will have in her new position as mission commander, the title sounds so _right_ , like the fulfillment of a long-foretold prophecy. She would be a fool to reject the offer that finally allows her to have the command position of her dreams.

Predictably, she gets an earful from Dominik later that day when he calls her to ask how the interview went. She doesn’t blame him for his accusations of “Two years is a long time to be away from home” and “You should have discussed it with me first,” but she stands firm in her actions despite his objections. There is no turning back now, and so everything moves forward at lightning speed: getting everything in order before she leaves, meeting her fellow crew members, and engaging in several weeks of mission training. Even when she boards the transport shuttle and rockets out of Earth’s atmosphere, none of it feels real. It’s not until she sets foot on the U.S.S. Hephaestus and takes in her new domain with an exhilarated breath that everything sinks in, the realization of all of the hopes and dreams that have led her to this moment. She is Commander Minkowski now, shedding her identity of Renée to become the leader that she has always wanted to be.

Commanding a deep-space outpost, of course, turns out to be nothing like she expects. The bizarre occurrences that constantly follow the Hephaestus in its orbit around Wolf 359 are difficult enough to deal with, but eternal frustration comes in the form of Doug Eiffel, her communications officer who seems to only exist to be a constant thorn in her side. Between his complete lack of work ethic and his constant mispronunciation of her name that she’s sure he does on purpose, she often wonders how they’re both still alive by the end of each stellar rotation. At least she always has the solace of her surroundings to keep her sane, and the breathtaking views of deep space and the red glow of Wolf 359 are even more beautiful up close than she has imagined. Not even the most hare-brained schemes that Eiffel devises to avoid performing his mission duties are enough to take that away from her.

Everything falls apart a year and a half into the mission on one fated Christmas when Dr. Hilbert’s attempted takeover of the station ends with a near-death experience and the successful deactivation of Hera’s personality core. Anyone else would have probably given up when faced with a broken mother program and a mutinous science officer, and Minkowski certainly feels the weight of defeat when she and Eiffel contact Cutter and request mission termination. But the show must go on, according to Goddard, and so she steels herself and pushes forward. She will not let this turn of events break her, because Commander Minkowski does not allow herself to crumble in the face of adversity. She _can’t_ , not when she has work to do.

The hidden audio recording that she and Eiffel find wired into the Hephaestus’s auxiliary systems, however, has other ideas.

“I don’t know you are. I know that you have no reason to believe anything I’m about to say, and I know there’s nothing I can do to prove to you that this isn’t some kind of trick. But please believe me, for your own sake,” says the voice on the recording. Minkowski _knows_ this voice, feeling its familiarity in the depths of her soul even though it has been years since she has heard it. But why is she hearing the voice _here_ of all places, when she has long since given up on encountering its bearer outside of her dreams? It must be a coincidence, she decides, a vocal doppelganger that is playing tricks on her mind.

She hushes Eiffel’s confused reaction and listens closer. “My name is Captain Isabel Lovelace,” the voice continues, and Minkowski’s breath catches in her throat at the name. “I am the navigations specialist and commanding officer of the U.S.S. Hephaestus Station. Nine hundred and forty-four days ago, I arrived at this station with a crew of five men and women under my command. Supposedly, we were on a deep space survey mission. They told us that we were studying the star’s unique radiation signatures and looking for signs of extraterrestrial life. Those were all lies.”

Minkowski can only listen in shocked silence, her heart pounding in her chest as the woman who her dreaming mind knows so well recounts how sickness and death has decimated her crew with no sign of support or rescue from Command. The presence of Isabel’s voice punches her in the gut even more thoroughly than the warnings about the deception and danger that surrounds the Hephaestus. Everything has now catapulted far outside the realm of coincidence, and she is determined to find out why.

She searches through the station’s files at the first opportunity she gets, but no records exist of Isabel Lovelace, nor of any other previous crew members. Minkowski feels like she is her thirteen-year-old self again, desperately seeking the answer to a question that doesn’t make sense. Her situation now extends far beyond mysterious dreams and the possibility of soulmates, however. This is about _survival_ , and living to see another day on her station where it has become increasingly clear that everything about the past year and a half has been a lie.

A couple of days later, running on minimal sleep after having to manage most of the station’s manual functions in Hera’s absence, Minkowski suits up for a spacewalk to check the status of some exterior sensors that the central processor has been unable to connect to. She walks across the hull of the Hephaestus, the magnetic field on her boots keeping her secured to the structure just like in the dreams. Her thoughts have often wandered to those visions of deep space and how surprisingly accurate they had been to the real thing, but now with Isabel fresh on her mind she sees the parallels in the landscape more strongly than ever: the structure of the station’s exterior, the strange combination of weightlessness and the pull of magnetic force with each step she takes, and the vast expanse of silent blackness that surrounds her. Has Isabel walked this same path against the hull of the station in years past, looking at the same star in front of her and remembering the dreams that brought her to a similar place? Is she out in the universe somewhere at this very moment thinking of her, or has she met the same tragic end as the rest of her crew?

Minkowski halts her steps, staring out at the orange-red light of Wolf 359. The red dwarf star is not as luminous as Earth’s sun, but the Hephaestus orbits it closely enough that she usually avoids looking at it directly even with the protective shielding of her helmet. Today, however, she is drawn to its brightness, its glow pulling her attention toward it as if it is calling out to her. _Renée_ , whispers an echo in her mind, using the name that no one on the Hephaestus addresses her by. _Renée._

She shakes off the voice, dismissing it as a side effect of sleep deprivation. She has not slept in over forty-eight hours, after all, and she would not blame her brain for playing tricks on her. _Focus_ , she tells herself with a bracing breath as she resumes her steps to approach the external sensors that she is here for. _You have work to do_.

She checks the sensors and performs the necessary adjustments on them before returning inside the station. As she takes off her gear after passing through the airlock, her exhaustion hits her like a freight train, leaving her eyelids heavy and her thoughts unfocused. She ignores her body’s protests against running on fumes and instead stops by the mess to get yet another cup of coffee to refuel herself with caffeine rather than slumber. The reconstituted seaweed bits that pass for coffee do not do much to keep her awake, and so she drifts off into a nap while working at the flight computer on the bridge an hour later.

For the first time in over two years Minkowski finds herself back in the deep-space dreamscape. She now recognizes the nearby space station as bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Hephaestus--or perhaps her perception of it in the dream has reacted to her intense familiarity with the Hephaestus in reality. She half-expects to see Isabel there, floating in front of her as she did in her youth and young adulthood, but even after stumbling across her voice in reality, the dream does not react accordingly. Instead, Minkowski remains as alone as she had been the last time she’d come here, floating aimlessly with nothing but her disconnected dreaming thoughts to accompany her.

“Where are you?” she mutters, her words laced with frustration rather than desperation. “Tell me what’s going on. Tell me why I found your message on the Hephaestus. What the hell is happen--”

The dream cuts out abruptly before she can finish the sentence, and she jolts awake to the sound of Eiffel rousing her with a hesitant “Commander?” She remains at her workstation, although she has drifted away from the terminal in her slumber, and she immediately checks the nav system to ensure that the Hephaestus has not slipped out of its orbit while she has been sleeping on the job. The station’s position remains nominal, averting disaster for now.

“I’ll be fine,” she insists when Eiffel suggests that she get some proper rest. Despite his surprisingly productive and responsible behavior in the wake of the current crisis, she is nowhere near ready to hand over navigations and the central processor to him even for a few hours. She is the one in charge of this disaster, after all, and she will be damned if she does not personally see it through until the end.

The light at the end of the tunnel grows a little brighter after Hilbert agrees to repair Hera’s damaged components and bring her back online. Even when he is escorted back to his prison on the observation deck afterwards, the same lying monster as he was before, everything runs much more smoothly with Hera in control of the station’s systems once again. Minkowski is not naive enough to believe that the worst of their situation has passed, because the atmosphere of the station has been a ticking time bomb since Christmas, but she breathes a little easier in the weeks that follow. Hilbert and his Decima research remains a pressing issue, but all she can do is keep him locked up and hope for the best.

She has not forgotten about Isabel’s abrupt appearance in her waking life, of course. All of her lingering questions become thrown into sharper relief one day when she and Eiffel end up in the formerly sealed off laboratory while Hera fixes an error that nearly vented them into space. Old audio logs that have been left behind on one of the servers bring the familiar voice back into Minkowski’s ears, and the mystery of Isabel’s tenure on the Hephaestus deepens with each log that she hears. In the first recording she hears echoes of the Isabel that she knew in her younger years, as she keeps herself entertained through broadcasting fictitious tales of a hostile alien boarding party and playfully harassing her stick-in-the-mud communications officer. There’s something hardened in her as well, however, the all-business steel of competency when she stops being Isabel and steps into being Captain Lovelace whenever her crew is in trouble. Minkowski hears the gradual unraveling of her psyche as the mission takes multiple turns for the worse, and her descent into fear and paranoia that leaves her almost indistinguishable from the person that Minkowski knows from her dreams. Her heart aches for what Isabel has had to endure, and despite the distance that now exists between them in the absence of their shared dreams she wishes that she could have somehow been there for her, if only through the empty comfort of sleeping thoughts.

But because this is the Hephaestus and nothing is ever simple, there has to be the twist ending at the conclusion of the final log: another familiar voice, its gravely tone and Russian accent immediately identifying its source as Hilbert, or rather an earlier iteration of him that had been running the same experiments and telling the same lies. It’s that detail that nags at Minkowski the most later when she plays and replays her recording of what she had managed to weasel out of him about Isabel Lovelace’s fate. “The rudimentary escape pod she constructed malfunctioned. It fell into the the star’s gravity well and was incinerated. She is dead,” Hilbert’s voice on the recording says over and over again, speaking his words slowly and clearly as if Minkowski is a small child who might not understand their meaning. Each time she rewinds his statement and listens to it again, she believes his words a little less. The story cannot end here, with an ill-fated escape attempt that resulted in Isabel’s death. Minkowski refuses to believe that Isabel has burned up with her homemade shuttle when she has finally come so close to encountering her in her waking life. Too much binds them together--if not the destined thread of soulmates, then at least the threads of the Hephaestus, Hilbert, and a mission gone wrong. None of it can be a coincidence, and maybe the decades-long mystery of the true nature of the connection between her and Isabel lies at the intersection of these commonalities.

As she ponders these questions, Minkowski keeps herself busy in the only ways she can after she has patched up the metaphorically crumbling walls around her. She spends multiple weeks hunting the plant monster throughout the station in a desperate attempt to feel in control of _something_ \--a misguided course of action, she eventually realizes after her traps put Eiffel’s life in danger. She therefore lays down her weapons and puts aside her botanical grudge, allowing herself to rest in the longest amount of time that she has slept since coming to the Hephaestus. She does not dream during this period of slumber, but when she eventually wakes she cannot shake the familiar feeling that she used to get whenever she dreamed about Isabel--a premonition, in hindsight, warning her that her life on the Hephaestus will soon be turned on its head yet again.

The harsh alarm of a proximity alert blares in her ears, pushing away her lingering drowsiness with the fear and adrenaline of potential danger. She has Eiffel on the comms immediately, setting up a point of contact with the small spacecraft traveling on an approach vector toward the station. Minkowski has no idea who or what she expects to respond, but she speaks into the comms system with all of the confidence that she can muster, relying on the rigidity of protocol to guide her.

“You are talking to the commanding officer of the U.S.S. Hephaestus,” she says in response to the confused and indistinct voice on the other end of the comms. “Now, I say again: please identify yourself.”

A long pause hangs in the air. “No, _this_ is the commanding officer of the U.S.S. Hephaestus station,” says the other voice. Its sound pierces Minkowski straight through her heart when she recognizes it, finally hearing it in real time outside of her dreams. A breath hitches in her throat, her mouth hanging open in a gasp of surprise as the threads connect. “This is Captain Isabel Lovelace, U.S. Air Force, commanding officer of the U.S.S. Hephaestus. So who the hell are you?”

 

* * *

 

In her younger years, Minkowski had often thought about how her first meeting with Isabel in the waking world might go. Most of her idle fantasies involved a dramatic embrace as they fully look upon each other for the first time with no worries of waking up. Her imagined encounters certainly did _not_ feature them pointing their guns at each other in a scene heavy with confusion and distrust, but that reality is what awaits her when Captain Isabel Lovelace emerges from her shuttle.

The sight of her sends an immediate burst of familiarity through Minkowski, despite only having seen her face for a brief moment over twenty years ago. It’s as if her heart _knows_ her, as much as Minkowski does not want to think about the implications of _that_ realization too hard. She has changed beyond that single glimpse, of course, her face having lost its preteen youth and her hair cropped shorter, but there is no doubt that the woman who stands in front of her is the same person that Minkowski has met so many prior times. There’s something different in her gaze, however, as Minkowski stares past the gun pointed at her face. Her dark eyes no longer contain the sparkle and light that once drew Minkowski’s attention, and instead they show nothing but emptiness and desperation. She may physically be the same person that Minkowski knows from her dreams, but after the tragedy of the first Hephaestus mission the bright and mischievous Isabel is long gone. The only person who now remains is the broken shell of Captain Lovelace.

Minkowski does not say anything about recognizing her in the conversation that ensues, even after Lovelace has surrendered her gun to her to diffuse the immediate hostility between them. She isn’t even sure whether Lovelace remembers her, and if she does, she certainly does not say anything about it in the days that follow. There is no room for Minkowski to bring up the awkward topic of the possible connection between them when it becomes increasingly clear that Lovelace has no interest in smoothly integrating herself into the crew. Unless the concept of fated companionship involves the possibility of being blown up at any moment because your apparent soulmate has a bomb wired into the shuttle that brought her to you, destiny has a _very_ wrong idea about the path of their relationship development.

But even through the hostilities and distrust, there are moments when Minkowski sees flashes of the Lovelace that her dreaming mind once knew. She still tells jokes sometimes, and Minkowski has to endure a particularly long and meandering one about a bear during one rotation in the shuttle while Lovelace is elbow-deep in the innards of one of its consoles. She also continues to push forward in everything she does like a car with no brakes, refusing to give up on the repairs to her shuttle despite the overwhelming challenge of getting a pile of scrap metal and nuclear hazards ready to fly again. Minkowski sometimes catches herself giving into the sense of admiration that overcomes her at Lovelace’s determination in the face of hopeless situations--but then she remembers that Lovelace is not afraid to blow up the Hephaestus with her on it if the opportunity arises, and the feeling vanishes.

On one particular afternoon, she is working with Lovelace in the shuttle, trying her best to stall her as she gets closer and closer to figuring out how to get the shuttle’s start-up sequence to run to completion with no errors. Their conversation takes a turn for the genuine as Lovelace expresses her suspicions about Minkowski’s intentions. She certainly does not waste any time softening her words when it comes to calling people out, and although the accusations of cowardice and not having a plan for revenge against Goddard sting at Minkowski’s pride, she does not let Lovelace rattle her. Instead, she strives to understand the woman who has endured so much. Even if she cannot uncover the person she once knew in her dreams, she hopes to solidify her as someone she can trust rather than the volatile element of a potential threat.

“I care about _you_ , Captain,” she says as she emphasizes how important each of her crew members is to her in response to Lovelace explaining in no uncertain terms how difficult it was for her to watch her crew die. The walls that have surrounded Lovelace since her return to the Hephaestus have cracked during their conversation, revealing a little more of the vulnerabilities hidden within her. “I know you don’t believe me, but I _am_ going to find a way to prove that I want to help you.”

The final _ding_ of the startup sequence echoes through the shuttle’s cabin. Lovelace’s eyes meet hers, and behind their hardness Minkowski sees something new: the light of hope.

“That’s a good start,” Lovelace replies.

“Wait, what--” Minkowski begins, but Hera’s auto-confirmation of the successful completion of the startup sequence interrupts her. Right. The shuttle. That _must_ be what Lovelace refers to when she says “a good start,” but Minkowski wonders if there is a broader meaning behind her words. Has Lovelace realized that they are now on the path to reaching a better understanding of each other after the tumultuous circumstances of the past few weeks? Is Lovelace seeking the same answers as she is, trying to reconcile the present with the dreams of the past?

She has little time to ponder these questions before the more important reality of the situation comes into focus. With the shuttle now more-or-less fully operational, Lovelace will likely be staging her escape from the Hephaestus any day now, and _God_ , Eiffel is never going to let her live down how she has accidentally helped Lovelace find the final piece of the puzzle to get her shuttle operational. She therefore grits her teeth with a resigned “Happy to be of assistance” when Lovelace compliments her for the work that led to their success. So much for her claim that she wants to prove her willingness to help Lovelace, she thinks as she devises a hasty plan to buy her crew some more time.

The plan never goes into motion, however, because soon the situation on the Hephaestus once again takes a turn for the worse. In the span of a single week, she has to deal with Eiffel nearly dying from a Decima attack, an unexpected call from Cutter that almost ends in disaster, strange astronomical activity that results in Wolf 359 turning into a blue dwarf (who knew that was even a _thing_?) and pulling the station out of orbit, and Eiffel getting stranded in space when the bomb in Lovelace’s shuttle detonates with him inside. As Lovelace lies on Hilbert’s operating table after she has shoved Minkowski out of the path of some flying debris to take the brunt of the injury, Minkowski feels Lovelace’s struggle to stay alive in her own veins as if she herself is the one clinging to life. She has only experienced such inexplicably intense emotions once before, on that evening back on Earth when she felt as if part of herself was suddenly missing. In the overwhelming rush of fear and desperation that overcomes her, it does not fully sink in that Eiffel is now hurtling into a likely death in deep space until she hears Hera’s report of “He’s not showing up on any of my scans, Commander. He’s gone.”

The days that follow are some of the lowest that she has experienced on the Hephaestus, and it’s all too easy for her to mentally portion out blame between her attempts to continue onward as if nothing has gone wrong. At first she blames Lovelace, although she’d never say it to her face. If Lovelace had not been so goddamn _heroic_ , her dead man’s switch that controlled the bomb would have never gone off when her heart temporarily stopped--but as good as it feels to shift the blame to someone else, it does not take long for Minkowski to shoulder the guilt herself. If she were a better commander, maybe Eiffel would still be with them and the Hephaestus would not have fallen into a state of increasing disrepair that she cannot fix. She has waited her entire life for an opportunity like this, to be in charge of a deep-space mission, but now she must face the truth that she is nothing but a failure.

It takes over three months for the looming tension between the remaining crew members to reach a boiling point, but it eventually happens one morning when they are confined to the freezing-cold aft deck in the wake of yet another station malfunction. By the time the heating system is operational again, they are all mentally exhausted from the long-brewing confrontations and the shock of Minkowski’s revelation that the Hephaestus is rotting from the inside out. Minkowski’s heart is heavy with the weight of despair and failure when she finally makes the call to Command to inform them of the crew’s dire circumstances. Her spirits sink with each tone from the pulse-beacon relay that indicates a ring of the phone that has gone unanswered on Earth. She has never felt so alone and abandoned than she does in that moment on the bridge, facing the confirmation that either her message is unable to reach Canaveral, or Cutter and everyone else at Goddard Futuristics have chosen to ignore a call from the Hephaestus. Neither option offers her much hope, and so she remains on the bridge for a little while longer, her eyes filling with tears that cannot spill forth in zero-gravity conditions.

“Do you think I’m a failure, Captain?” she asks Lovelace later when they are both grabbing a cup of coffee in between repair rotations. She speaks hesitantly, unsure if she wants to hear the inevitable honest answer that Lovelace will give her.

Lovelace regards her as if she is considering her words carefully. “Well, you said it yourself earlier today,” she replies. “What happened isn’t anyone’s fault. And if you want my opinion, the only way you can be a failure is if you give up on your crew and getting us out of this mess. Do you intend on doing that any time soon?”

“No,” says Minkowski. “Of course not. But…” She trails off, taking a sip of coffee to test its temperature. “I don’t know how you did it during your mission. Holding yourself together when everything was falling apart. There’s… There’s only so much I can do, you know?”

“Yeah, if constantly being on the edge of a nervous breakdown counts as holding yourself together.” The bitter humor in Lovelace’s response soon gives way to sincerity. “Look, I know I’ve been hard on you in the past, and we don’t always agree on everything. But you haven’t actually done a bad job around here.”

“It hasn’t really been a _good_ job, though,” Minkowski murmurs, more to herself than to Lovelace. She cradles her mug of coffee between her hands, staring down at the lid that keeps the liquid in place.

“Hey. Cut that out,” orders Lovelace. “None of us has the time to sit around throwing pity parties for ourselves. So you’re going to suck it up and keep on being a leader, because you have a crew who needs you. Got it?”

Her words carry the stern tone of an officer giving a wavering subordinate a firm talking-to, but beneath the harshness Minkowski hears a trace of familiar determination. It’s the same perpetual motion that Minkowski has sensed from her on so many prior occasions, both on the Hephaestus and in the dreams: a relentless momentum that refuses to stop for anything. When Minkowski raises her head to meet her eyes, she sees the burn of fire within them. Their intensity draws her in just as they did when she first caught a glimpse of Lovelace years ago.

“Yes, Captain,” Minkowski replies. It’s not quite the “Yes, sir” of subordination that she would give to a superior officer, but she makes sure to respect Lovelace’s rank regardless. Even though the current situation on the Hephaestus has gone far beyond the limits of military protocol, there are some things that she cannot easily unlearn after years of discipline.

“Good.” Lovelace takes a drink from her own mug of coffee. “Now, let’s get back to work. Might as well stay busy to keep our minds off how screwed we are, right?”

Minkowski murmurs in agreement. “I’ll have Hera help me draw up a new repair rotation schedule for the rest of the week.”

Lovelace pushes off from her position to propel herself forward. As she passes by Minkowski, she touches a hand to Minkowski’s shoulder. The contact is brief, perhaps intended as a gesture of reassurance, but it passes through her like electricity on a live wire. Minkowski almost pulls away in surprise, feeling something familiar in the touch that brings her back to the scene of floating in space. The sensation leaves as quickly as it comes, and soon Lovelace’s hand has moved away from her of its own volition as she makes her way out of the room. Minkowski watches her leave, and as her eyes remain on her retreating form something rises inside her that she’d previously believed impossible.

 

* * *

 

If there was ever a wrong place to fall in love, the decaying innards of a deep-space research station where everything has gone wrong would definitely be it.

“Love” is a strong word, of course, but it sneaks its way into Minkowski’s thoughts in insidious pathways during the weeks that follow her unexpected heart-to-heart with Lovelace in the face of failure. The change in emotion should not have come as such a shock to her when her dreams have spent the better part of two decades pointing her affections toward Lovelace. After burying herself behind rationalizations of why the dreams have been nothing but childish fantasies, however, she cannot immediately accept how her admiration for Lovelace’s relentless strength has transformed into something deeper along the way. She also cannot forget who she has waiting for her back home. “I found my soulmate in deep space after spending weeks thinking she was going blow me up” is _not_ a story that Dominik will readily accept if she ever returns to Earth.

But “if” is the operative word in that statement, and with each distress call that goes unanswered the likelihood that Minkowski will see Earth again becomes increasingly slimmer. If she is indeed going to die here, as the Hephaestus’s systems fail one by one until it can no longer support human life, shouldn’t she do so in the company of the person whom her dreams have been pointing her toward? Perhaps that has been fate’s intention all along, driving them into each other's’ arms when they face the looming reminder of their own mortality. Minkowski certainly does not intend to die alone, at any rate, and so she stops ignoring the nagging feeling of attraction and acknowledges it for what it is.

She decides to make a final inquiry of research to ensure that she has not spent all of these years chasing after a falsehood. “Hera, do you have anything in your files and databases about soulmates?” she asks in the relative privacy of her quarters. “Particularly about having visions of your soulmate in your dreams?”

“Why do you want to know about that?” Hera asks in suspicion. “Shouldn’t you be more concerned about--”

“It’s just something I need to know,” Minkowski interrupts her. “Do you have the information or not?”

“Let’s see… Ah, okay. I do have a few sources that indicate a possible connection,” says Hera, confirming what Minkowski had read in that college library all those years ago. “It’s usually seen as an urban legend, since only approximately twenty-five percent of a surveyed population reported that they first met their romantic partner through dreams. I can’t find any scientific explanation for it, so I guess whether it’s a real thing or not depends on who you talk to.”

“That’s what I thought,” Minkowski murmurs.

“Have you had these dreams, Commander?” inquires Hera. “About your husband before you met him?”

“Not about him, no.” A stab of guilt twists its way through Minkowski’s stomach. “They were… They were about someone else.”

“Oh.” The single word conveys Hera’s full acknowledgement of how complicated the situation is for Minkowski, even leaving aside the identity of the person who has appeared in her dreams. “Do you love them? The person you dreamed about, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Minkowski admits, although her heart already knows the answer. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be bothering you with something like this. Like you said, we have bigger things to worry about right now. I should get back to work.”

“Okay, Commander. I’ll be here if you need me for anything else.”

Armed with a secondary confirmation to what she had learned over twenty years ago, Minkowski makes the executive choice to summon all of her courage and talk to Lovelace. With more crucial systems going offline every day, she may not have much time left to act, and so she seizes her opportunity while she and Lovelace are working on some exterior repairs together. It is the first time they have done a spacewalk together on the Hephaestus, since Lovelace has spent the better part of the past few months barred from wearing a space suit while recovering from having shrapnel surgically removed from her abdomen. The scene is inescapably familiar to her as she walks with Lovelace across the hull, except this time she _knows_ she is not dreaming. The dreams have never felt more like a prophecy as they do now when she stands at Lovelace’s side with the vast expanse of space surrounding them.

“You can’t say that it isn’t beautiful,” Lovelace says, looking out at the blue mass of Wolf 359 in between patching up a damaged panel. “Even after all the crap that we’ve been through, it’s still a damn good view.”

Minkowski makes a noise of agreement as she finishes up her own work. “We might be the only people in the entire galaxy who have seen a blue dwarf star. It’s amazing to think about.”

A brief laugh comes through Minkowski’s comms. “Once a space nerd, always a space nerd, huh?”

At first the response seems unremarkable, but as the observation replays itself in Minkowski’s head, something is inherently not right about Lovelace’s words. During their time on the Hephaestus, she has never said anything to Lovelace about her lifelong interest in space and how this mission has allowed the fulfillment of a goal she has had since she was a young child. Lovelace would have had to learned the information elsewhere--like in a dream from decades past.

“You know,” Minkowski begins, swallowing her hesitation, “when I was younger, I used to have these dreams where I was floating in outer space. There was a space station too, kind of like the Hephaestus now that I look back on it. And… there was another girl with me.”

She hears nothing over the comms in response, and so she turns to face where Lovelace works. Lovelace has dropped the wrench that she has been using on the paneling, and she reaches out to grab it before it floats away from her. Her helmet obscures the expression that she shows in response to Minkowski’s words, leaving her reaction a mystery.

“I always thought she was cooler than I was,” Minkowski continues on. “It wasn’t easy for me when I was a teenager. I was the misfit with the thick accent who wasn’t pretty or popular, but she didn’t seem to care about any of that. She was one of the best friends I ever had, even though we only saw each other in our dreams. And this girl--her name was Isabel.”

This time, she hears the quiet gasp of a breath in her ears. “Jesus Christ,” Lovelace murmurs. “That really was you, wasn’t it?”

Surprise and relief flows through Minkowski, bubbling up inside her with the confirmation that maybe all of this has meaning after all. “You remember?” she asks.

Lovelace laughs. The sound is lighter and far less weighed-down than anything else that Minkowski has heard from her during these few months that they have spent together on the Hephaestus. “Yeah. God, I hadn’t thought about it for so long, but then suddenly I was back here and--I don’t know, I felt like I _knew_ you. I figured I was just going crazy.”

“Well, you’re not alone there.” Minkowski wets her lips nervously beneath the cover of her helmet. Lovelace has not yet resumed her work on the panel, instead focusing her full attention on Minkowski and the revelations of their conversation. She might as well go all the way with her confessions, she decides, now that the preliminary groundwork has been laid out. “There are some things that I never told you back then, you know,” she says. “You never really seemed interested in what the dreams meant, but I looked it up one day a while after they started happening. There was a book that said that sometimes recurring dreams about someone you’ve never met are leading you toward your--”

“--soulmate,” Lovelace finishes for her, and now it’s Minkowski’s turn to almost drop her tools in surprise. “Yeah, I looked it up too. I thought it was a load of crap, personally. No use bringing it up. But I _did_ kind of have a crush on you back then, in hindsight.”

“And do you still think it’s a load of crap?” asks Minkowski. She leaves aside the detail of the adolescent crush for now, even though it makes her heart race like she’s a teenager again.

“Honestly? I’m not sure what to think anymore.”

Lovelace returns to repairing the panel, facing away from Minkowski as she works. Minkowski watches her progress, fearing that the conversation has ended here with so much left up in the air, undefined and unexplored just as it had been in their youth. With her own work completed for now, she secures the tools that she has been using and walks toward where Lovelace is fiddling with the damaged panel, stubbornly working it into something more serviceable. In her frustration, Lovelace bangs a hand against the metal in an attempt at percussive maintenance, but the action gives her no results.

“What a piece of--” Her words break off into an irritated sigh. She turns around to face Minkowski again. “Mind giving me a hand with this?”

Minkowski obliges, holding the cracked part of the panel in place so that Lovelace can patch it up. Their gloved hands brush against each other as Lovelace tests the structural integrity of the repaired panel. Warmth floods through Minkowski at the touch, and the sensation is different from the electric jolts that she has experienced with the initiation and then renewal of attraction. This touch instead carries with it a sense of familiarity and security, as if their hands belong together like this. They look at each other, their eyes obscured by their helmets, and nothing in Minkowski’s life has ever felt so right until this moment.

“I meant it, you know,” she says. “That one time in your shuttle, when I said that I cared about you. You might have not made the best first impression with the whole bomb thing, but still… There was something about the way I felt that I didn’t want to face at first. And now I think it’s time to stop running away from it.”

The quiet, amused breaths of Lovelace’s laughter comes through Minkowski’s comms. “Hey, it’s not like you made the best first impression either. You spent three weeks trying to sabotage repairs on my shuttle, for Christ’s sake. But…” She hesitates, as if searching for the right words. “Well, you’re really something, Commander. And it’s about frickin’ time we figured out this thing between us, honestly.”

Lovelace tightens her hold on Minkowski’s hand in a wordless gesture of affection, slotting their fingers together to the best of their ability. Almost out of instinct, Minkowski feels like she will wake up at any moment, pulled out of the dream like she has been many times before. She is not dreaming, however, and Lovelace’s touch and the emotions that it elicits within her are far more than figments of her sleeping mind. They are real, and they are happening, and now she knows that those dreams have been leading her to this exact moment.

“We should, um.” Minkowski clears her throat. “We should probably finish up our work before we run out of O2, shouldn’t we?”

“Nah, screw that,” Lovelace replies. “We’re going to go back inside, and I’m going to kiss the hell out of you.”

“Oh. That’s--that’s a good plan too.” Minkowski lets go of Lovelace’s hand and gestures forward to her. “After you, then.”

They make their way back to the airlock together, their footsteps moving as fast as their boots can carry them across the hull. After they have passed through the airlock, anticipatory energy buzzes between them while they wait for Hera to complete the pressure exchange that will allow them to safely remove their suits. The all-clear notification from Hera sends Minkowski into a flurry of motion as she takes off her helmet and the bulky exterior of her space suit. Her hands feel as if they cannot move quickly enough, and she does not dare to look at Lovelace until she is freed from the gear that has defined their dreaming encounters.

When she finally looks upon Lovelace, it’s as if she is seeing her for the first time, awakened to something deep inside her that has always been there. In one swift motion Minkowski pushes off from the wall to close the distance between them, and only the briefest hesitation passes before their lips meet in a kiss. Lovelace’s mouth is warm against hers, and through the kiss they speak everything that has been left unsaid between them. The passion that flows forth is unlike anything that she has ever experienced, with galaxies blooming behind her closed eyelids and fire coursing through her veins as she holds Lovelace tight.

When they finally break the kiss, all is quiet between them as their foreheads press together, their breaths synchronized as they inhale and exhale the same air. A sense of tremendous peace passes through Minkowski, as if in this single moment everything is right in the universe. At last she is where she is supposed to be--in the arms of her soulmate, the woman to whom her dreams have led her.

“Well,” Lovelace says. “That only took us, what, twenty-plus years?”

“But at least we finally got here.” Minkowski runs a hand along Lovelace’s cheek, touching the shape of her face that she memorized years ago. “We might not make it out of this mess alive, but until the end, I’ll always be with you.”

“Yeah,” says Lovelace. “No matter what happens, I’ll be here.”

They float together, drifting in their embrace, and a unified whisper of “I love you” follows them until it fades away into the silence of their bliss.


End file.
